`

Nebraska Authors

Paul A. Olson

Born 1932

A distinguished literary historian and scholar, Olsen has published six books and many articles on medieval, Plains and Indian literature, English education, higher education, linguistics, and composition. Olsen was director of the Center for Great Plains Studies, served on the board of the Center for Rural Affairs, and has long been involved in rural culture and education. He helped found the Nebraska Writing Project, which seeks to maintain the quality of teaching at rural and small community schools in Nebraska.

dsc

Places Lived

Lincoln, NE
Princeton, NJ
ENGLAND

Author Of

  • Nonfiction

Keywords

Literary History; Literary Criticism; Scholarship

Education

Bachelor of Arts, 1951, Bethany
Master of Arts, 1953, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
Ph.D., 1957, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Studied in London on a Fulbright Scholarship

Occupation

Professor of English, 1957 to 2007

Places Worked

University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE

Honors

Nebraska 150 Books honor for A Few Great Stories of the Santee People, 2017
Fulbright and Guggenheim scholar
Sue Tidball Award for Creative Humanity, 1994
Service award for 40 years of work at University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1997
Nebraska Literary Heritage Association’s Literary Heritage Award, 2008

Associations

Served as Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies;

Bibliography

The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society. 1986.
The Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Insight and Industrial Empire in the Semiarid World . 1990.
A Journey to Wisdom: Self-Education In Patristic and Medieval Literature. 1995.
The Kingdom of Science: Literary Utopianism and British Education: 1612-1870. 2003.
Beyond a Common Joy: An Introduction to Shakespearean Comedy. 2008.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

  • The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
  • We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
  • To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
  • Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
  • While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to NebraskaAuthors@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.

/
Paul A. Olson
paul-a-olson

Do you have corrections for the above information or other information to add?:

(e.g. Author is buried in Fremont, not in David City / Also wrote for the Daily Nebraskan during her time as a student)